Son Thai Le et al., IEEE PTL, 2014 1 Abstract-In this letter, we experimentally study the statistical properties of a received QPSK modulated signal and compare various bit error rate (BER) estimation methods for coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) transmission. We show that the statistical BER estimation method based on the probability density function of the received QPSK symbols offers the most accurate estimate of the system performance.Index Terms-Bit error rate, coherent detection, coherent optical transmission, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.